End Users '20 under 40' 2016—Brian Phillips

Brian Phillips, 31

Associate director, global security and resilience, Alexion Pharmaceuticals

New Haven, Conn.

Brian Phillips has more than 10 years experience in physical security, nearly four of which have been at his current position at Alexion, a global bio-pharmaceutical company in 55 countries that makes orphan drugs designed to treat diseases that are ultra rare and life threatening.

“My role is to run the physical security department on the global scale, which includes all of our guards, our access control, mass communication and management systems and platforms,” Phillips said. “That includes all of the technology integrations for the global security group, so I report to the CSO for Alexion.”

Phillips's strong background in technology has been an asset at Alexion.

“My first project here was to deploy a global access control program that would scale with the company, and with my experience with the S2 security system, I thought it would be the perfect system because it is browser-based,” said Phillips, who noted that there were only 400 employees when he first started and now there are more than 5,000 worldwide.

“We have had some rapid growth, and we were able to integrate our HR system so people's badges are automatically created and shut off as needed,” he said. “We also have an integration with our visitor management system to automatically create employee and visitor profiles, and we tied our mass notification system into our access control system to deliver critical communications in an automated fashion.”

One of the key areas of focus for Phillips is the company's common operating platform. “We have a new GSOC that we just moved into, and the main focus is on intelligence analysis, incident monitoring and looking at what is going on around the world and always asking the question, 'How does this impact Alexion—our patients, our employees, our new markets, etc.?'”